Robert Goddard - Borrowed Time

“Surely you don’t believe him?” demanded Paul, stepping across to Sarah and shaking her by the shoulder. “He’s making the whole thing up.”

“I thought Daddy’s reaction was just a different kind of grief,” she said quietly, almost reflectively, as if unaware of Paul’s words ringing in her ears. “I thought he just couldn’t bring himself to think ill of Mummy and that’s why he refused to accept our story. But I was wrong. It wasn’t grief. It was guilt.”

“Jesus Christ, Sarah, concentrate on what we’re here to do. You’re letting it all slip away.”

“I was doing this for him. I was trying to take away his pain as well as mine. And now I discover… he was ultimately responsible for everything Naylor did.”

“Snap out of it.” Paul slapped her cheek and glared into her eyes. I moved cautiously towards them. “Robin’s lying to you.”

Sarah frowned pityingly at him. “No, Paul. He isn’t. Naylor named Cassidy as his accomplice when we held a gun to his head and gave him no choice but to tell as much of the truth as he knew. We just didn’t want to listen. Because blame is so much easier to deal with when it’s indivisible. Now it has to be shared out among God knows how many people, some of whom we’ve never even heard of. And my own father has to take the largest portion.”

“Only Naylor raped your mother. Only Naylor strangled her.”

“That’s not good enough any more.”

“Not good enough?”

“No.” Her cheek had reddened where he’d slapped her. She cast me a fleeting look of conviction mingled with resignation. In it I felt I could read her exact state of mind. The justification she’d prepared for her actions had lost its purity. If she went on, its debasement would become all-consuming. Slowly and carefully, she opened the chambers of the revolver and slid the bullets out one by one into her palm.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m giving up. I have to. We have to.” She reached past him, dangling the empty gun by its trigger-guard from her forefinger, offering it to me while she kept her eyes fixed on Paul, so intently-so imploringly-that he seemed unaware of what was happening. I stretched forward, lifted the gun from her finger and slipped it into my raincoat pocket. Unloaded, it didn’t feel like a real weapon at all, merely a weight dragging at my coat, an encumbrance we’d all be well rid of. But I knew there was a second gun, clutched in Paul’s right hand. And that was still very much a weapon. “It’s over, Paul,” Sarah said gently. “We can’t go on with it. Not now.”

“ You can’t, you mean.”

“It amounts to the same thing. We’re in this together or not at all.”

“And at your say-so I have to write off three months of making people think I’m a murderer? I sometimes thought I’d be driven mad by the contradictions and convolutions of what you said I had to do to convince them. I only survived because I believed in what we’d set out to do. And now you’re telling me to forget it. Dismiss it from my life. Well, I can’t. And I won’t.” The pitch of his voice had been rising as he spoke. Now something like a convulsion seemed to grip him. He took a step towards Sarah, then swung round and stared at me. “You bastard!” he roared. “You may have got to her, but you won’t get to me.” He raised the gun and for a heart-stopping second I thought he was actually going to shoot me. Sarah must have thought the same because she rushed forward and grabbed his arm, the bullets she’d taken from the other gun spilling out of her hand and clattering to the floor.

“Paul! Listen to me.”

But Paul wasn’t about to listen to anyone. He flung Sarah off, spun round, leant over the bath, grasped Naylor by the collar and clapped the gun to his head. Naylor winced and squirmed, but was unable to resist. With the tape sealing his mouth, he couldn’t even try to reason with the man who had it in his power to destroy him with one squeeze of his forefinger. The fragility of life-ours as well as his-was suddenly and horribly clear. Sarah and I stood stock still, both of us paralysed by the ease and imminence of the act. Perhaps Sarah hadn’t imagined what it might mean until now; hadn’t envisaged the smashed bone and spattered blood. If so, the images swarming in my head hadn’t entered hers until this moment. It was a harsh awakening that might soon become a gory reality.

“Don’t do it,” she said hoarsely.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Paul looked round at us, his eyes blazing. “I haven’t forgotten Rowena, even if you have.”

“It’s for her sake I’m asking. She wouldn’t want you to do this.”

He hesitated. His grip slackened. The barrel of the gun eased back from Naylor’s temple, leaving its circular imprint on his flesh. Paul began to tremble. He seemed to be holding tears only just at bay. Tears of anger and frustration and grief. “We can’t just… give up,” he sobbed.

“We must,” said Sarah.

“He deserves to die. You said so yourself.”

“Not this way. Not now.”

“It would be murder, Paul,” I said as calmly as I could. “And Sarah would be an accessory. You’d be condemning her to prison along with yourself.” Whether this was legally true or not I had no idea. I could only hope Paul had none either. “Do you want to do that? Do you really want to do that?”

“I want… justice.”

“Then let him live. There can’t be any further doubts about his guilt. He’ll go back to prison and rot there. You’ve made sure of that. You have his confession on tape. And we know the truth. Once that’s out in the open, nobody’s going to lift a finger to help him.”

“Aren’t they?”

“You know they aren’t.”

I could sense him longing to hear us say his efforts hadn’t all been in vain. He’d risked his sanity, his liberty and his future to make amends to Rowena for not saving her. And they were still in the balance. But tilting even as we watched. Towards life. Towards hope. Towards some kind of dignity.

“You’ll have stopped the tongues wagging, Paul. You’ll have nailed the lies. Isn’t that enough?”

It should have been. Paul should have said “I suppose it’ll have to be” and handed me the gun, reluctantly but conclusively. Then it would have been over. Finished. With no permanent damage done. We could all have breathed again. And lived.

But it wasn’t over. And it was far from finished. Because Paul didn’t respond to reason and logic the way I’d expected. I’d made the oldest mistake in the book. I’d calculated what I would do in his shoes. I’d imagined how I could best be talked into surrender and assumed it would work with him. But we never really know what’s going on inside another person’s head. We never have the faintest clue. Which words will douse the flame? Which words will fan it into a blaze that can become in a second a raging conflagration? We have no idea. We can only guess. Right or wrong.

“ Isn’t that enough ?” No. It wasn’t. Not nearly.

Paul stood upright and swung round, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on me. He put his left hand into the hip pocket of his jeans, pulled out a small key and held it in front of him, cupped in his palm. “Take it,” he said quietly.

“What is it?”

“The key to the shackles. You want to let Naylor go, don’t you? Well, do it.”

“Hold on. I’m not sure we should just-”

“Do it!” He raised the gun and pointed it straight at me, his finger still curled around the trigger, just as it had been when he’d held the weapon to Naylor’s head.

“This isn’t necessary, Paul,” put in Sarah. “We can leave him where he is until the police arrive.”